The market has been up and down for months, going nowhere in the process. Against that frustrating backdrop, our Top 100 Women Financial Advisors are warning investors not to let frustration trigger impulsive decisions.

“The best opportunities come to people who plan ahead and don’t get greedy or fearful,” says Cheryl Young, a
Morgan Stanley
advisor in Los Gatos, Calif., who is 44th in the 2016 ranking.

This year’s top women are using their strong communication skills to keep clients focused, while also scouring the investment landscape to uncover extra return. For Young, that involves using options for both growth and income opportunities. Second-ranked Shannon Eusey, in

Tap to see the Top 100 Women table. Illustration: Dale Stephan's for Barron's

Newport Beach, Calif., is relying on focused funds, whose managers use a small number of investments in an effort to beat broad indexes. West Chester, Pa.–based Patricia C. Brennan, our 42nd advisor, sees some pop in the natural-resources sector.

This year’s ranking features 21 new advisors, including three in the top 10—Shannon Eusey, Valerie Newell, and Colleen O’Callaghan. Kimberlee Orth of
Ameriprise Financial
clocks in as this year’s No. 1—a first, both for her and her firm. Others making big jumps up the list include Morgan Stanley’s Deborah Montaperto, who rose to No. 15 from No. 50 last year, and Christina Boyd of Merrill Lynch, who climbed 33 spots to No. 27.

Audree L. Begay
Photo: Robert Seale for Barron’s

Audree L. Begay

Ameriprise Financial Assets: $922 million Rank: 33

Raised in a Navy family, Begay learned to adapt to new people and situations on the fly. “In high school, I roved across different cliques,” says the Houston-based advisor, 46. “That still helps me today.”

Early in her professional life, Begay used these people skills at the Feather River State Bank, a local community bank in Yuba City, Calif.

“Many clients would tell me that I’d explain things in a manner that made them feel comfortable,” she says. “I knew I wanted to become a financial advisor from working at the bank.”

With her military background, Begay joined the Army to help pay for college, graduating magna cum laude in 1996 with a business degree from what is now Tarleton State University in Texas. At the suggestion of an Army transition counselor, she sought a position with American Express Financial Advisors, the predecessor firm of Ameriprise. “They had the best training in the industry,” Begay says.

Begay now heads a team of 11 and manages $922 million for 469 households. Many of her clients work at major oil companies, and lately she has been helping them plan for an uncertain future.

The advisor sees a low-growth environment ahead. Although it’s difficult to find value in growth-oriented investments, a few income-producing options look promising, she says. These include utilities, preferreds, and dividend-paying stocks. In particular, utility shares have been providing both strong growth and income. The sector is up 13% over the past 12 months.

Begay warns clients to avoid investment fads such as loading up on gold or silver. “Most of the time, I encourage them to not get caught up in trends,” she says. “They tend to end up in ways clients didn’t expect, and timing is not their friend.”

On the planning side, Begay has been busy lately helping oil-industry clients think about accepting early-retirement packages. “We help them decide whether they can accept a voluntary package, and plan a bridge [to retirement],” Begay says.

In general, she says, investors should be paying less attention to the market’s ups and downs and more to things that are in their control. This includes having the optimal asset allocation and keeping an eye on expenses and cash flow.

Another factor outside of investors’ control is the presidential race, Begay says. When clients voice their anxieties, Begay reminds them that they expressed similar concerns during past election cycles—and that the worst did not come to pass.

Begay traces part of her success to her competitive nature. She has completed two Ironman competitions and many other, shorter-distance triathlons.

“I have to push my limits,” she says.

Cheryl Young
Photo: Martin Klimek for Barron’s

Cheryl Young

Morgan Stanley Team Assets: $1.1 billion Rank: 44

Young, 42, believes that being open and honest with clients is more important than always being cool and collected. “I’m very blunt, and I’ve even been known to cry in front of clients,” she says. “But it puts people at ease because they know where they stand.”

An 18-year advisor, Young heads a team of six, managing more than $1 billion for 304 households. From her office in Los Gatos, Calif.—just down the road from
Netflix
headquarters—she sees a market that is likely to be volatile, but ultimately flat, for the next few quarters.

To help clients navigate that environment, she is sticking with balanced portfolios, but also using options to protect capital and generate extra income. Specifically, she is buying puts and selling covered calls.

Young grew up in Las Cruces, N.M., with 10 siblings. “There were six before me, so I really had to fend for myself early on,” she says. “My husband swears I still eat with my elbows out.”

Four MLPs and One Energy Stock for Income

She was an excellent student, entering New Mexico State University at age 16 and graduating with a degree in business and psychology. While doing graduate work at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine—she planned to become a neurologist—Young took a finance class. Intrigued, she started investing $50 a month and found she was good at it. Before long, she had talked her way into a job with Ameriprise. She later went independent, and then joined Morgan Stanley in 2012.

Young is a big fan of exchange-traded funds, which she uses to overweight undervalued sectors and underweight expensive ones. Right now, she likes technology and, to a lesser extent, energy. She’s underweight financials and health care.

Young has studiously avoided buying stocks just for their dividend yields. A lot of those elevated payouts are not sustainable, she says.

“For example, lots of energy names are attractive based on their dividends,” she says. “But if you look under the hood, they have no way to pay down their debt or cover their current declared dividend.”

Young is bearish for the next couple of quarters and expects markets to sell off, whether the Fed raises rates or stands pat. Still, she says that next year—not this year—could be the time to worry about a stock market dip. “If you go from a Democrat to a Republican, the Dow has been negative every single following year,” she says, “and the S&P has been flat or negative without fail.”

Young doesn’t slow down much during her free time. Her hobbies include kickboxing and skiing, and she has run the Boston Marathon six times. “Marathon running clears my head and [lowers] my stress level,” she says. “I also think about people’s finances like a marathon—this is a long race, not a sprint.”

Patricia C. Brennan
Photo; Jared Castaldi for Barron’s

Patricia C. Brennan

Key Financial Assets: $649 million Rank: 42

A former nurse, Brennan sees parallels between medicine and finance. “When there’s a crisis, you have to be able to respond quickly, have a set protocol, think on your feet, and communicate clearly in a way people will understand,” she says.

Brennan, based in West Chester, Pa., has had plenty of experience with financial crises, starting with the 1987 crash that occurred shortly after she changed careers. She has successfully guided her clients through 31 years of ups and downs. Today, the 57-year-old manages $649 million for 537 households.

Brennan says her clients tend to be “thought leaders—whether in their career, their communities, or even the family.” They understand their strengths and delegate their money management to experts, she says. Brennan’s investing advice today? Take some gains from large-cap growth, and look for a bit of portfolio pop in the natural-resources sector.

She also likes health care and biotechnology. They “have been crushed this year, and [their] fundamentals don’t support the dramatic declines,” she says.

Growing up in Newtown Square, Pa., Brennan was, by her own account, unremarkable. “I never had a lemonade stand, was a pretty homely kid, and never won any most-likely-to-succeed awards,” she says. “Successful people aren’t always the smartest ones in the room; they’re the most resilient.”

That said, Brennan did rack up some achievements. She earned her nursing degree from Georgetown University, where she was captain of the women’s lacrosse team. But even after she started working as an oncology and intensive-care nurse, she couldn’t stop thinking about a financial-planning class she had taken at Georgetown. “That [financial] bug never left my head,” she says.

Brennan learned everything she could about the field and in 1985 answered a newspaper ad placed by a small financial-planning firm. Three decades later, Brennan, who earned a Certified Financial Planner designation along the way, couldn’t be happier. “It sounds really odd, but my work is my hobby,” she says.

Brennan now heads a team of 15, and she has structured her firm to accommodate multiple generations of clients. She has built a bench of advisors in their 30s and 40s, and another in their mid-to-late 20s. “Families come in, the Mom and Dad see me, and we send the kids to meet with people their own age,” she says.

One of the keys to Brennan’s success is to set aside time early in the day for demanding but vital tasks. These might include reviewing global asset allocations or researching tactical tilts in client portfolios. The practice, she says, is loosely based on a Mark Twain quote: “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning, and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.”

Shannon Eusey
Photo: Ian White for Barron’s

Shannon Eusey

Beacon Pointe Advisors Assets: $7.5 billion Rank: 2

Whether in her career or her hobbies, Eusey, 46, is all in. Example: She has already run three marathons in the past 12 months, and has two more on her calendar for the fall. “I’m incredibly disciplined,” she says. “I expect the same from our team.”

Working from Newport Beach, Calif., Eusey and her six-person team serve private clients and institutions, managing $7.5 billion of investments in all.

A Newport Beach native, Eusey began working at age 14 at a local bakery and elsewhere. She earned a social sciences degree from the University of California, Irvine, funding her education with the help of a volleyball scholarship.

She interned at Smith Barney during college, then went to work with Roxbury Capital Management, an investment firm, in 1994. She rose to senior managing director in an eight-year stint there, earning her M.B.A. from the University of California, Los Angeles along the way. Her work at UCLA included writing a business plan for the independent advisory firm she planned to launch.

She envisioned a hybrid firm providing independent, objective advice to families and institutions. She persuaded her father, Garth Flint, a successful financial consultant to foundations and endowments, to start the firm with her. The pair are not the only financial advisors in the family: Three of Eusey’s five siblings are in the business.

Eusey believes that traditional balanced portfolios can outperform market-timing strategies as long as they feature the best managers. Her favorites include Alpine Capital Research, which runs an equity quality-return strategy; Vaughan Nelson Investment Management, known for its small-cap value-equity strategy; and
Artisan Partners,
which runs a successful international value fund.

She often seeks out focused strategies, where managers make high-conviction bets on a limited number of stocks rather than “hugging” market indexes. “The last thing we want a manager to do is weigh down their best ideas with ideas they’re not as passionate about,” says Eusey.

Her overall goal: participate in 70% to 80% of market gains, while keeping downside exposure to 50% over a market cycle.

Right now, Eusey sees some of the best opportunities in dividend stocks, private equity, and private real estate deals. “And I wouldn’t shut the door on munis,” she says. “I think we’ll start to see better returns as interest rates rise.”

It’s especially important for investors to work from a comprehensive financial plan, says Eusey. It’s something she has prided her firm on taking seriously. “A lot of firms say they do financial planning. But are they really understanding what a client is trying to achieve?”

Marcella Behman
Photo: Shawn Henry for Barron’s

Marcella Behman

Merrill Lynch Team Assets: $1.4 billion Rank: 39

Behman turned adversity to inspiration at a young age. When she was a high school senior, the two restaurants her family owned burned down. “It was tough to see everything kind of go away so quickly,” says Behman, 53.

The 26-year advisor now spends much of her time helping corporate executives avoid the trap of overconcentration in company-issued stock. Diversification is key for such executives, who make up the core of Behman’s practice.

In high school, she was head cheerleader, class vice president, and frequently the lead in theater productions. And she was permanently on call at the family restaurant in case a waitress didn’t show up. “I learned at a very young age to work hard and take ownership of what you’re doing,” she says.

It took an early-career shift for Behman to discover her life’s calling. She started as an accountant in 1987 with Price Waterhouse, but gradually realized that the field could not satisfy her entrepreneurial and creative drives. So she quit, then hired a career counselor, and ultimately knocked on Merrill Lynch’s door.

“I’ve always been very self-motivated,” she says.

As an investor, Behman likes to combine passive and actively managed investments. For the large-cap core of a portfolio, for instance, she’ll often use a large-cap manager alongside a passive Standard & Poor’s 500 index fund. The idea is that the index will provide market-level returns, while the active manager provides the potential to outperform, often by running a focused portfolio that allows for high-conviction bets.

The ratio of active to passive investments depends upon the efficiency of a particular market. For domestic large-cap stocks—a very efficient market—indexes do the heavy lifting, for example. In a less-efficient asset class, such as small-cap or foreign stocks, active managers would have a larger weighting.

Behman’s favorite areas right now include biotechnology, and health care more broadly. “It’s been beaten up recently, so there’s a lot of value,” she says. “We see tremendous opportunity there.”

She is “always looking for opportunities to tweak portfolios tactically,” and one way she’s doing that is by overweighting value, which has outperformed growth this year.

On the fixed-income side, Behman has done well so far in 2016 by pairing laddered muni bonds with an active muni strategy, much as she has done with stocks.

Two and a half decades into her career, Behman is still at her desk by 5 a.m. “I can get more done then than over the course of the entire day,” she says.

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